


Taught to Hope

by forthegreatergood



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Domestic, Explicit Language, Fluff and Angst, Getting Together, Love Confessions, M/M, Misunderstandings, Mutual Pining, Pining, Post-Apocalypse, Requited Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-27 02:16:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20752676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forthegreatergood/pseuds/forthegreatergood
Summary: A few weeks after the Apocalypse is averted, a winged mug starts a long-overdue conversation about Crowley’s habit of giving Aziraphale angel-themed presents.“So long as they make you happy, angel.” Crowley raised his glass to the lamps and drank deep. “That’s all they were meant to do in the first place.”“The dancing naked angel lamps were meant to make me happy.” It seemed improbable; Aziraphale could remember the mischief lurking in Crowley’s eyes when he’d undone the twine holding the packages together.“Well, meant to make you stop squinting at your books by candle-light like an impoverished clerk in a Dickens novel, anyway.”





	Taught to Hope

**Author's Note:**

> All characters property of Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, and the respective production and licensing companies.
> 
> Thank you, [foxyk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxyk/pseuds/foxyk), for betaing!

Aziraphale rolled his shoulders and settled down comfortably into his chair. It was times like these that he missed his pipe; there were few things better than settling down in a comfortable chair after a nice dinner and having a bit of a puff over a cup of coffee. He reached for his cafe au lait and glanced at the sprawling, lean figure draped across his loveseat.

“It makes you look like somebody’s doddering granddad, angel,” Crowley had scoffed into his beer sometime in the ‘80s, before the pub they’d met at when it was too rainy for the park and too crowded for the bandstand closed down.

Aziraphale hadn’t missed that pub, which wasn’t really fair to the pub itself. It simply had the misfortune to take over for the theater, once it became rude to make any noise at all during plays, and Aziraphale had never quite been able to forgive it for what it wasn’t--barfights were a poor substitute for scripted swordfights with musical accompaniment. Crowley had offered him a few coins for the jukebox the one time he’d bothered complaining about it, and Aziraphale hadn’t been sure if Crowley was joking or not.

Aziraphale lifted his cup to his lips, and Crowley chuckled from the couch.

“I still can’t believe you kept that,” he said after the laugh trailed off into a small, soft sigh.

“Kept what?”

“That mug.” Crowley drained his glass and reached for the bottle again.

Aziraphale’s fingers tightened around the smooth ceramic warmth of it, and he frowned. “If you didn’t think I’d like it, why did you give it to me?”

Crowley balanced the wineglass on his narrow chest and focused on filling it to some very precise level, his brows furrowed and his lips pursed. Finally satisfied, he set the bottle back on the floor and shoved himself into a vaguely upright position against one of the arms.

“I didn’t say I didn’t think you’d like it,” he said, with an obnoxious, casual emphasis to his words. As if Aziraphale was being deliberately obtuse by not understanding him. As if deciphering what Crowley meant by anything had ever been simple or straightforward. Words came so easily to the demon, it was like he delighted in turning them back on themselves and making a maze of them. “I said I still can’t believe you kept it.”

“Why wouldn’t I keep it if I liked it?” Aziraphale asked wearily. 

He could feel a small, portentous headache starting right behind his eyes, the same as he’d gotten every other night Crowley had come over without being invited or given permission, flopped onto the couch or the loveseat or into an armchair, reached for whatever was handy, and stayed the evening. Not that Aziraphale objected, or was tired of Crowley’s company, or even wished Crowley would go away again, but there were a few things he’d hoped to have a bit of breathing room on. Crowley’s overwhelming, overweening _presence_ made it impossible to think clearly.

And then, that desire for a bit of space to get a grip on himself was at odds with the feeling that if he started turning Crowley away now, the demon might simply vanish. Just thinking about it made a queasy sort of dread slither and coil in the pit of Aziraphale’s stomach. Everything that had happened, and he still had something left to lose. Where would he even start looking, if Crowley flounced off now?

Crowley looked at him over the rim of his glass, and that was one of the things Aziraphale had hoped to have some time to adjust to--Crowley never wearing his sunglasses in the bookshop anymore. He still wore them outside and when there were customers wandering about, but when the door was locked and it was just them, off came the glasses. There was something to being subjected to those honey and amber eyes for hours on end that made Aziraphale want to call on God for mercy, for a reprieve, for _something_.

“Dunno. You didn’t keep anything else, even though you liked them. Or,” Crowley’s eyes took on that distant look that Aziraphale had come to understand as Crowley sifting through centuries worth of memories, “you _seemed_ to like them, anyway. That mug being the one thing that got to stay--”

Crowley broke off with an incredulous noise and shook his head.

“I…” Aziraphale held the mug in his hands and stared at the demon. “What do you mean?”

Crowley’s eyes focused on Aziraphale’s face, brows furrowed and lips pursed, and Aziraphale wondered how the wine hadn’t boiled under the strength of that regard. It was simply too much, without the glasses. Watching Crowley’s lips had been safer, the emotions they carried softened by the distance they had to travel, by the way Crowley would be opening his mouth to speak in the next moment.

“I mean, you didn’t keep anything I gave you except for that one mug.” Crowley frowned and glanced at the bottle on the floor. “That is what I said, isn’t it? This is only my second glass, yeah?”

Aziraphale swallowed and glanced at the cherub lamps in the window, the angel bookends, the appalling statue of Cupid near the door, before letting his gaze return to Crowley. Crowley cocked his head and stared back at him, unflinching but uncomprehending.

“None of those were me, angel,” Crowley said. He pointed at the cherub lamps. “Cheap knock-offs. Well, I guess not cheap, not by today’s standards, but the hands are all wrong. The ones I got you had fully detailed fingers. Those were just popped out of the mold and polished up and then they called it a day.” He gestured vaguely at the bookends, which he couldn’t see without sitting up, and that was apparently out of the question. “Marble. The ones I gave you were soapstone.”

“Oh.” Aziraphale lifted the coffee to his lips and drank, and it tasted too bitter in his mouth.

Crowley craned his neck so that he could almost see the statue. “And that’s properly Cupid. Got his quiver and bow and everything. Mine was just a putto.”

“I didn’t realize you’d put so much care into the selection process,” Aziraphale said quietly. They’d been handed over like so many of Crowley’s other careful disbursements of affection and attention, with that cool sort of backhanded smile, that way he had of saying “Oh, I saw this and thought of you.” that made it clear the thought hadn’t necessarily been complimentary.

Crowley threw his head back and laughed, hard enough to be in danger of spilling his wine, and Aziraphale’s cheeks burned. All this time, and a trip to Hell itself, and he still hadn’t learned his lesson.

“That’s…” Crowley wiped his eyes on his sleeve and snorted. “You make it sound like I found a whole warehouse of angel-themed knickknacks run by some monomaniac importer and spent days combing the place looking for just the right pieces.” He shook his head. “I mean, the selection process was easy. See something that reminded me of you, buy it. It’s just you get to know something when it’s sitting in your flat for however long it takes for the intended recipient to be in the proper mood to, you know, receive it.”

Aziraphale turned the mug in his hands, fingers curling around the wings. Crowley had always made it sound like he’d seen something on the way to the meeting and picked it up on a whim.

“Shame about the bookends,” Crowley murmured after a moment. “The detail on the feathers was unbelievable, for the time. It was just after they started having magnifying glasses for what you might call entertainment purposes, and the artist had swiped one from a lord who owed him for a carving and wasn’t going to pay up. I almost kept them.” He sighed. “Would’ve, if I’d known you’d like the idea but not the piece. Gone looking for something properly hideous for you, all in white marble with gold leaf.” His lips curled into a smile. “Commissioned something, even.”

“Crowley.” Aziraphale closed his eyes. The headache wasn’t so small anymore; he could feel the tight throb of it all through his skull and down his neck.

“Mmm?”

He could hear the demon shifting position on the loveseat, and when he opened his eyes again, Crowley was sitting halfway up and wedged into the corner between the back and the arm, elbow sunk into the upholstery.

“What do you mean, the proper mood to receive it?”

“Ah.” Crowley bit his lip, and his fingers twitched along the back of the couch. “Well, you know. Not rejected out of hand as a bribe, or… I mean, whatever was going on that time with the rug. A present’s meant to please someone, not take their seasonal melancholy and make it a million times worse, send them into a fit and make them take to their bed for a week.” 

“It was only a few days,” Aziraphale protested, around the catch in his throat. He’d been so angry with Crowley over that rug. It had felt like a slap in the face, when Crowley had unfurled it with that barely-suppressed smile, eyes on Aziraphale to catch his reaction in a way he’d been able to feel even around the glasses.

“It was eight and a half days,” Crowley said, his voice going flat. He drained his glass and reached for the bottle again. “But who’s counting?”

“What did you wind up doing with it?” The news had been nothing but the Ottomans this and the Ottomans that, and he’d been so afraid of another Crusade. Not that they’d have called it that, probably, but it would have been the same old barbaric impulses dressed up in more fashionable clothing. And then Crowley had turned up with the loveliest Persian rug and a smug “Brought you back a souvenir, angel.” 

Aziraphale had been sick with it, sick with the reminder of how much blood Crowley had on his hands, sick with the way humanity never seemed to move past its worst impulses, sick with his own failure to encourage their better natures. Had he even managed to say anything, before he’d turned around and fled the room? Probably not--he’d felt like he was choking with everything he couldn’t articulate, everything he’d been swallowing for thousands of years. When he’d finally dragged himself back out of bed, the rug had simply been gone again.

“I considered just chucking it in the river,” Crowley confessed, his eyes focused on the wine. “I figured, _that_ kind of reaction, it’s probably properly cursed now. But it was… you know, they were so hard to find, even then. You just didn’t see them, anymore--not like that.” He shrugged. “It would’ve felt a bit like taking a sledgehammer to all those Roman statues they kept digging up. I miracled it into some shabby little mosque on my way out of the neighborhood. I thought they could use some cheering up even if you couldn’t.”

Aziraphale put the mug aside and kneaded his temples. _Seasonal melancholy._ Crowley had been trying to...

“So, what happened with the lamps? You pawn ‘em to make ends meet and then forget to swing back and redeem them for a decade or two? Lose them in a pile of books and just buy replacements rather than go looking for them in such treacherous terrain?” Crowley raised his eyebrows. “Throw them at an archangel?”

“I--” Aziraphale exhaled slowly. 

They’d arranged for lunch, at a club Aziraphale was a member of. He’d been asked to introduce his friend, and it had just slipped out: “Oh, we’re not friends.” Circumstances would have made it ridiculous to fall back on his old standby of not knowing Crowley, of them just happening to accidentally exist in the same place at that moment, of it being professional courtesy that they weren’t trying to kill each other. And Crowley had smiled with those too-sharp teeth and agreed--“Yes, just colleagues. Bit of business we’re clearing up.”--and as soon as they’d been alone again, he’d told Aziraphale that he’d changed his mind.

_“Best to just handle it myself. No sense dragging you into it. Enjoy your lunch, angel.”_

Crowley had thrown down enough money to cover the meal and then some, and then Crowley had left before Aziraphale could find the words to make him stay without making it sound like Aziraphale was eager to help, and then Crowley hadn’t come back for seventy years.

If Aziraphale had been fit for purpose, there wouldn’t have been that convenient space for a dramatic exit--it would have been as simple as seizing the demon and holding him still. Aziraphale had been made a soldier; pretty words would never be his forte. He’d given up the sword, not traded it in for something easier on the conscience. Aziraphale was never going to be able to talk Crowley into anything--not with Heaven’s speeches readymade and easy to hand, and certainly not with his own fumbling attempts at persuasion. He’d never been sure if it was easier to bear Crowley’s seething contempt for the rhetoric that wasn’t Aziraphale’s or Crowley’s mocking patience for the floundering that was.

Even now, Crowley was waiting quietly for him to pull himself together and answer, head tilted and fingers loose around the stem of his glass. If Aziraphale hadn’t found some way to break himself, some way to warp what She’d made whole, he wouldn’t need to pull himself together. He could sweep Crowley into his arms, pin him to the cushions, kiss him deep enough that Crowley would understand what had happened.

_You left, and I couldn’t stand to be surrounded by reminders of you._

_You left, and I couldn’t stand the empty spaces where there used to be reminders of you._

But no. Crowley was a demon--he wouldn’t be held, wouldn’t be touched, barely tolerated the occasional accidental brush of their hands. Maybe if Aziraphale had thought to try before he’d seen Hell, when he’d had only Michael’s example to follow, when he’d thought that forcing a demon to yield and then showing mercy might earn a measure of trust, a portion of obedience… 

Aziraphale hadn’t thought to, though, and he had seen Hell, and he knew he’d be too much of a coward to see it through. He didn’t want Crowley afraid of him, and he was afraid of hurting Crowley, and if he tried and lost his nerve halfway through, Crowley would never let him near enough again to mend it, never mind try a second time.

Across the room, Crowley watched him patiently, sipping at his wine and content to bide his time.

“I sold them, and I gave the money to a soup kitchen,” Aziraphale said, finally. “And then I couldn’t stand the empty spots where they’d been, so I filled them back up.” He smiled bitterly. “I obviously didn’t get it quite right, though.”

“So long as they make you happy, angel.” Crowley raised his glass to the replacements and drank deep. “That’s all they were meant to do in the first place.”

“The dancing naked angel lamps were meant to make me happy.” It seemed improbable; he could remember the mischief lurking in Crowley’s eyes when Aziraphale had undone the twine holding the packages together.

“Well, meant to make you stop squinting at your books by candle-light like an impoverished clerk in a Dickens novel, anyway,” Crowley said. “Meant to brighten the place up a bit in the winter, after you stopped going abroad for the coldest month or so of it. Meant to make you smile when you remembered what they were and why you had them.”

Crowley’s smile turned soft, and he glanced at Aziraphale, his eyes questioning.

“And the bookends?” Aziraphale asked.

“Well, those really were in case you needed something nice and heavy to throw at an archangel but didn’t want to risk damaging a book,” Crowley told him, laughing. “Which I’m sure would have made you happy, too, if you’d ever worked up the nerve to do it.”

Aziraphale thought of soft red hair wrapped around his fingers and flushed. All the times Crowley had egged him on when it came to being daring and rebellious, all the times Crowley had tried to get a rise out of him about repeating Heaven’s justifications. There’d only ever been one thing he’d wanted to work up the nerve to do, and it was of course the one thing Crowley would never let him get away with.

“Though if you were short on cash, you could have just asked,” Crowley said. “I could’ve moved a few things around--”

“You were asleep.” It came out too sharp, too quickly, and Crowley’s lips thinned. “I mean, it happened while you were asleep. 1830s, I think.”

“So, I took a well-deserved nap, and instead of leaving me a message or two telling me you needed something, you sold everything I’d given you and donated the money to charity.” Crowley let his head rest on the back of the loveseat. “Honestly, angel.”

Aziraphale flushed. “Why would I leave a message for you? You’d already been asleep for decades.”

“And I got up every few years to check for communiques, dash off a few reports to keep Hell from poking around too much, and miracle the dust and cobwebs off everything. I was trying to have a nice lie-in, not get myself declared an archaeological find or summoned before the throne.” Crowley rolled his eyes. “Thank Satan for that pack of chemists who got the bright idea to start a newsletter. All I had to do was skim that and the newspapers, find everything that looked like it’d be a real problem once the industrialists got ahold of it, and take credit for it. By the time I was out and about again, Beelzebub thought I was a genius.”

“Such a genius that you need holy water to defend yourself against your newfound good fortune?” Aziraphale grumbled. All that time he’d spent fretting over Crowley, and wishing he could take back what he’d said, and the demon had been dragging himself out of bed every so often to answer his damned mail.

“Well.” Crowley made a face. “You remember what happened to the goose that laid the golden eggs, right? And what got that poor girl who made the deal with Rumpelstiltskin locked up over in the first place? I’d have been better off keeping my head down, but there’s really no rhyme or reason to what gets paid attention to, Downstairs.”

Crowley drank his wine and held it on his tongue for a moment, and Aziraphale was a little surprised that he seemed to be enjoying it so much. Crowley had gotten it for him as a gift, and it was full-bodied and sweet, and it tasted like the first good hard rain on a green hillside in early summer felt. Crowley tended to prefer his wines tart and dry, which was why Aziraphale had case after case of wines he didn’t much care for himself sitting in the cellar. He supposed it was rather on the nose for Crowley to prefer swiping something back from an angel to being content with his own portion.

“If you were that angry, why not just give me the holy water when I asked for it?” Crowley asked quietly, after a few minutes of silence had stretched between them.

Aziraphale sputtered into his coffee, eyes wide. Perfectly demonic logic, wasn’t it? If someone leaving for a while was reason enough for a sulk, the only possible answer could be to give them the means to make the leaving permanent and irreversible out of sheer contrarian spite.

“I was angry with you for taking yourself off like that,” Aziraphale snapped, once he’d gotten his breath back. “I didn’t want to see you _hurt_ over it.”

“Not even a little?” 

There was a prodding there, a suspicion, that made Aziraphale squirm in his seat. He hadn’t had any time to think, between Crowley handing him that note and Crowley expecting an answer, and every word of denial, every plea, in every language that he’d ever learned had stuck in his throat and drowned like a bird’s nest in a downspout. 

He’d said things he hadn’t meant, and things he hadn’t meant to say, and then he hadn’t known how to take them back. It had been another moment in the long catalog of their time together when he’d wanted to grab Crowley and make him obey, to roar out his hurt to the world, and been too frightened of what Crowley might do in response to risk it. 

Michael might have brought the dragon to heel, but whoever that had been had wanted to live, and Crowley had been asking for the one thing above all else that could kill him. Aziraphale had had nothing but the horror of what it meant, to try negotiating a surrender at swordpoint when one wanted nothing more than one’s opponent unharmed.

“What would you have done, if I’d just decided to go to bed for a hundred years and not say anything beforehand?” Aziraphale asked, instead. What lies would the demon tell, when he was still pouting over eight and a half days and holding himself blameless over decades and decades?

Crowley stretched out on the couch, dangling one foot off the side and giving Aziraphale a wicked look. “If you’d gone to bed for a hundred years, I’d have built you a cunning glass dome to keep off the dust and a great fuck-off castle to keep out the archangels and covered it with briars to keep away the lookie-loos. And then I’d have curled around the no-trespassing sign and bitten anyone who gave it a go and tried to bother you anyway.”

He lifted his glass archly, and Aziraphale drank his coffee, ears ringing and tongue leaden.

“You wouldn’t have.”

“I would have.” Crowley smirked. “Still would, if you want to put it to the test.”

Aziraphale closed his eyes and tried to think around the thrumming in his blood. 

They’d been in Lebanon, and Crowley had smiled and tried to put a bracelet on him. It had been beautiful, a gold band set with tiny rubies and embossed with a winged lion holding its own tail in its mouth. He had loved it, and he’d looked up to see the delight in Crowley’s eyes, and he’d known he couldn’t accept it. He’d pulled his arm out of Crowley’s grasp and moved to the other side of the fire. It had been twenty years before he’d seen Crowley again.

They’d been in Turkey, and Aziraphale had drank too much and fallen off a barge. He’d manifested his wings in a ridiculous, drunken attempt to fly, and they’d sucked him under when they’d gotten waterlogged. Crowley had jumped in after him and pulled him to the bank and kept him warm until the sun had risen and he’d sobered up. He’d mumbled something about avoiding paperwork, and Crowley’s tired face had gone stony and unreadable. It had been ten years before he’d seen Crowley again.

They’d been in London, and the Ottomans had been in the news, and Crowley had tried to cheer him up with a beautiful carpet. Aziraphale had turned around and walked away, and Crowley had thought there was something wrong with the rug. It had been a year before he’d seen Crowley again, and yet Crowley had still known to the hour how long Aziraphale had spent moping in bed.

They’d been in France, and Aziraphale had been surrounded by boys he hadn’t been able to save and poisoned mud and shattered earthworks. Crowley had hauled him up and dragged him to safety and made him drink something and let him lean on Crowley’s shoulder while he wept. Crowley had been discorporated by a sniper’s bullet before the month was out, and it had felt like the world was ending, and Aziraphale hadn’t seen him again until the night he’d blown up a church to save them both.

They’d been on the bus, and the world hadn’t ended but their lives still might, and he’d been too tired to talk himself out of taking Crowley’s hand, and Crowley had been too tired to do anything but turn his palm up to meet Aziraphale’s and squeeze their fingers together.

Crowley had only ever hung back when it had been Aziraphale insisting on it. Crowley had only ever stalked away snarling when it was Aziraphale provoking him. Crowley had only ever thrown something in his face when Aziraphale had thrown it in his first. Crowley hadn’t let him be for more than a day or so at a time since they’d survived possessing each other’s corporations. That Crowley could talk circles around him meant all the more when Crowley stopped and waited for him to catch up instead of barrelling on ahead.

Aziraphale had perhaps not found himself in such a tenuous position after all. He opened his eyes and found Crowley watching him, concerned.

“You feeling all right there, angel?” he asked.

“Just a little headache,” Aziraphale said. And it was true enough, really, around the shock of finally understanding that he’d built his house on sand, had stacked assumption after assumption on things he’d been told and never thought to question.

He got to his feet, slowly, and set his mug aside. If he’d misjudged, if he was lying to himself yet again, if Crowley fled...

Crowley’s brows knit as Aziraphale came closer. “Don’t have to go home, but I can’t stay here, eh?”

_If Crowley fled_. Aziraphale tried not to grimace. He’d been gently shooing Crowley out of the bookshop for weeks, now--whenever the demon had looked like he was about to fall asleep on the couch, whenever Aziraphale had felt stretched thin and restless and in need of solitude, whenever he’d wanted to inventory the new additions to the collection and found Crowley too distracting to continue.

“Crowley.” Aziraphale knelt next to the loveseat, and Crowley stared at him, suddenly transfixed. He reached out and cupped Crowley’s jaw, and Crowley went still as one of the figurines he’d given Aziraphale over the years, his eyes wide and dark. “If I wanted to kiss you…”

Crowley made a soft noise that could have been either protest or assent, and he didn’t move.

“Could I?” Aziraphale finished.

Crowley’s fingers tangled in his hair, hands pulling Aziraphale toward him, and Crowley leaned forward and pressed their lips together. It was, at last, an answer that required no words, no debate, no navigation of hidden pitfalls. Aziraphale leaned into the kiss, deepened it, slid his hand from Crowley’s jaw to the back of his neck. Crowley’s skin was warm, his hair soft, his mouth wet and yielding. He tasted of Aziraphale’s favorite wine, and his skin smelled of the comfort of the bookshop, and his hands were familiar and steady on Aziraphale’s body, and it had been so long and such a near thing that he hadn’t let himself have this.

It felt like an eternity and like no time at all when they broke apart, neither loosening their grip on the other.

“You know, it’s funny,” Crowley breathed, laughing. “I’d finally given up hope, and now here you are.”

“You didn’t think I wanted to.” Aziraphale had always done his best, not to hand Crowley any extra weapons he could use against him. Just in case, just to be safe, just to keep expectations firmly within the already-defined limits of the arrangement. Aziraphale had always done his best, not to give Crowley any extra reasons to go skittish and wary around him.

“You’re not as subtle as you think, angel.” Crowley looked away, and his eyes were unbearably tender when he looked back. “I was pretty sure you wanted to. I just didn’t think you were ever going to. You seemed, on the whole, like you’d prefer getting hit by a runaway wagon to acknowledging it.”

“Is that why you’ve been here so much lately? One last go at tempting me?” Aziraphale asked, stroking his hair. It was cool under his fingers, and he wanted to bury his face in it and just breathe.

“I’ve been here so much lately because I almost fucking died, and you almost fucking died, and everything else on the planet almost fucking died, and if you didn’t want me around, you were going to have to fucking say so.” Crowley kissed him again, fingers curled gently around the back of Aziraphale’s head. “I’ve been here because I wanted to be here. You not seeming to be in your usual flaming great hurry to throw me back out again was just a bonus.”

Aziraphale rested his forehead against Crowley’s, and Crowley’s pupils were like endless pools of night.

“I’m…” He shivered, and Crowley sighed against him. “I’m sorry I didn’t say anything, earlier. I’m sorry it took me this long to tell you.”

“Well, I did take a bit of heart in that apoplectic fit you had over the holy water,” Crowley said, his lips tugging up. “So I suppose you don’t need to apologize quite so hard over the past, say, hundred and fifty years or so.”

“You what?” Aziraphale asked, his eyes narrowing.

“Mmm. You stormed off, and after I’d calmed down a tick and didn’t quite want to throttle you anymore, I thought, well, if he’s in that much of a state at the sheer idea of me being wiped out of existence forever, then it can’t be _that_ bloody awful, being in love with me.” Crowley ran his thumb over the nape of Aziraphale’s neck. “Taught me to hope, as it were. As I had scarcely ever allowed myself to hope before, even.”

“Don’t go dragging Regency romances into this,” Aziraphale said, coloring. 

Crowley had thought… Crowley _knew_... Aziraphale swallowed thickly. The things he could say, if he was a poet. The things he should say, if he was a diplomat. He was neither of those things, but then perhaps Crowley had enough words for both of them. And perhaps he’d said more than he’d meant to, more than he thought he had, over the centuries.

Aziraphale settled for catching his fingers in Crowley’s hair, pressing him back into the cushions, and kissing him as if this might be his one chance to make Crowley understand him. Crowley softened under him, groaned with it, his mouth opening and his head cradled in Aziraphale’s hands. Crowley wrapped his arms around Aziraphale’s waist and kissed him back, and Aziraphale wondered if the seas might boil and the stars might fall with it, after all.

He pressed his lips to Crowley’s forehead, then his face to Crowley’s hair. 

“I love you,” he whispered into that tangled mess of red, and Crowley’s fingers curled in his shirt, pulling them closer. Aziraphale sighed, and smiled, and kissed him again.

Taught to hope, indeed.


End file.
